Nilekani goes down memory lane on return to Infosys

Bengaluru, Aug 25 Returning to the global software firm Infosys after eight years as its new non-Executive Chairman, co-founder Nandan Nilekani went down memory lane on Friday to recall his contribution to the country too.

“I was a CEO of this company and resigned from that position 10 years ago. In 2009, I was invited by then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take a job in the government in the status of a cabinet minister to do one of the world’s most sophisticated technology projects — Aadhaar (card) that has given over a billion people an identity and is the fundamental basis for India’s transformation,” said Nilekani at a news conference here.

Nilekani, 62, who was CEO of Infosys from March 2002 till April 2007 and its Vice-Chairman subsequently, quit the company in 2009 to head the Unique Identification Authority of India as its first Chairman till May 2014.

Asserting that he was also the company’s founder – of which he was proud, the technocrat entrepreneur said he was back because he believed that he had records of doing things.

“I believe in consensus building and my consultative skills have created factor,” he noted.

Reiterating that he represented 100 per cent of the shareholders, Nilekani assured them that he would discharge his responsibility with the highest standards of governance, treating all investors equally.

“We are trying to align complex things. This is not about founders and non-founders. This is about all of us working together to align a united company,” he said.

Clarifying that he was not going to run the company based on comments on Twitter and TV channels or on all kinds of reporting by the media, Nilekani said he was back at the request of all stakeholders to unravel a very complex situation and make sure that everybody was aligned and to take Infosys, which is a national icon, to its future.

“Can we have the next Infosys story in October? People are distracted by all kinds of reporting about us in the media. I seek your indulgence. We are going to reduce our interface with media for the next two months,” he said.

Lauding co-founder N.R. Naranaya Murthy for his contributions to the company and the country, Nilekani said he was the father of corporate governance in India.

“Murthy is a great visionary leader. He gave me my first job when I graduated from IIT Bombay in the 1980s in Patni Computers in which he was a software engineer. He has made extraordinary contributions to the country,” he added.